If you've lost track of SMC's equipment since it disappeared from CompUSA's shelves, rest assured: The company hasn't evaporated. It's been busy revamping its product lines, taking closer aim at small business rather than off-the-shelf home-networking components. The company sent us a sample in the form of the SMC TigerSwitch SMC6110L2. The TigerSwitch is similar to the HP ProCurve 1700-24 in the sense that both switches are primarily 10/100 units, but SMC takes a different approach with its product. Whereas HP strips down the feature set to keep prices down, SMC has upped the management smarts on this device, concentrating on specific functions useful for edge switching as well as IP clustering.

The 10-port SMC6110L2 is actually the smallest in the TigerSwitch family, which includes 28- and 52-port siblings in both standard and PoE versions. It's designed to provide the same kind of management smarts as its larger brethren, but in a size suitable to small and branch offices. The family also interoperates with a Gigabit Ethernet? line of products, the SMC81-Series, that has similar features but, as you'd expect, faster throughput.

The device isn't as pretty as the D-Link switches we reviewed recently, like the D-Link xStack DGS-3627, but its plain-Jane gray case does sport LED indicators, so administrators can see connectivity and preport connection speed. The first eight ports are standard 10/100, while the last two are SFP (small-form-factor pluggable)capable of acting as two more network ports or as GigE uplinks. A nine-pin RS232 serial console port allows for direct command-line communication, though you'll likely access the command line far more often through telnet.

The command-line stuff is fine for quick-and-dirty management in emergency situations, but you'll do most day-to-day management with the Web-based management software. The SMC6110L2 also supports standard SNMP, so you can move most of your monitoring tasks to a third-party network management app with SNMP support.

Those GigE uplink ports represent one of the key features in the SMC61-Series. They enable administrators to chain as many as 32 61-Series switches together into a single switching fabric, so you can start with 10 ports and finish with over 1,600. Aside from clustering, the SMC-61s also support several levels of quality of service (QoS) ranging from tagged to weighted fair queuing (thus spanning OSI layers 2, 3, and 4). That's a big step up from something like the ProCurve.

Clustering and QoS are obviously meant to be the big selling points for this series, but the company also did a really nice job of rounding out the 61-Series features. You'll find full support for all your security needs, for example, including HTTPS and SSL for management, TACACS+ for authentication, and SSH for telnet sessions. The GigE ports can handle jumbo frames and devices on the network and can discover the box using either IP addressing or UPnP. You can even store two firmware images, so in case a newly downloaded image doesn't work correctly, you can immediately switch back to the previous version.Next: Testing the TigerSwitch

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